nightfall; and most of the sermons were followed by exhortations for sinners to advance to the mourners’ benches to receive the more intimate and individual suasion of the clergy and their corps of assisting brethren and sisters.  The condition was highly hypnotic, and the professions of conversion were often quite as ecstatic as the most fervid ministrant could wish.  The negroes were particularly welcome to the preachers, for they were likely to give the promptest response to the pulpit’s challenge and set the frenzy going.  A Georgia preacher, for instance, in reporting from one of these camps in 1807, wrote:  “The first day of the meeting, we had a gentle and comfortable moving of the spirit of the Lord among us; and at night it was much more powerful than before, and the meeting was kept up all night without intermission.  However, before day the white people retired, and the meeting was continued by the black people.”  It is easy to see who led the way to the mourners’ bench.  “Next day,” the preacher continued, “at ten o’clock the meeting was remarkably lively, and many souls were deeply wrought upon; and at the close of the sermon there was a general cry for mercy, and before night there were a good many persons who professed to get converted.  That night the meeting continued all night, both by the white and black people, and many souls were converted before day.”  The next day the stir was still more general.  Finally, “Friday was the greatest day of all.  We had the Lord’s Supper at night, ... and such a solemn time I have seldom seen on the like occasion.  Three of the preachers fell helpless within the altar, and one lay a considerable time before he came to himself.  From that the work of convictions and conversions spread, and a large number were converted during the night, and there was no intermission until the break of day.  At that time many stout hearted sinners were conquered.  On Saturday we had preaching at the rising of the sun; and then with many tears we took leave of each other."[6]

[Footnote 6:  Farmer’s Gazette (Sparta, Ga.), Aug. 8, 1807, reprinted in Plantation and Frontier, II, 285, 286.]

The tone of the Baptist “protracted meetings” was much like that of the Methodist camps.  In either case the rampant emotionalism, effective enough among the whites, was with the negroes a perfect contagion.  With some of these the conversion brought lasting change; with others it provided a garment of piety to be donned with “Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes” and doffed as irksome on week days.  With yet more it merely added to the joys of life.  The thrill of exaltation would be followed by pleasurable “sin,” to give place to fresh conversion when the furor season recurred.  The rivalry of the Baptist and Methodist churches, each striving by similar methods to excel the other, tempted many to become oscillating proselytes, yielding to the allurements first of the one and then of the other, and on each occasion holding the center of the stage as a brand snatched from the burning, a lost sheep restored to the fold, a cause and participant of rapture.